For those of you that are familiar with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) world, you know about ARRA, HITECH and Meaningful Use. If so, you know that Meaningful Use is meant to give practitioners incentives to switch their charting to digital. And while Meaningful Use at it’s core has a very humanistic and futuristic spirit, it’s implementation via monetary incentives alone removes from some of it’s core purpose: increasing positive patient outcomes and decreasing cost. While Meaningful Use (MU) is and should be a clear principal player in the move toward modernizing health care, this concept alone is not enough to get us there. Here’s why:

I find it appropriate to cut the red tape on my new blog with something so relevant to every single person on this planet: population.

I found a cool iPad app called 7 billion offered by National Geographic that gives an in-depth look at the recently-achieved population size of 7 billion. And the first page of this application shows a great overview in lay terms on where we were, where we are, and where we are going.
Perhaps an even more interesting and worrisome issue is something that I learned in one of my classes in graduate school. The fathers and mothers of a 13 billion population are alive today. WOWZERS!